Hi Debian-Med supporters,
just back from DebConf 7 in Edinburgh I'd like to do some Debian-Med related
report about the event.
Debian-Med
General
I have organised a small BOF about Debian-Med:
http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/200706_debconf7_med/index_en.html
where I gave some information about the current status and future
plans. The attendees were interested but I wonder whether they
really show up on our mailing list. If yes please give a short
hands up by introducing yourself.
Sanger
There was an interesting talk of two DDs (Tim Cutts and Simon
Kelley both in CC) who are working at Sanger:
https://penta.debconf.org/~joerg/events/119.en.html
I noticed that these people do not really know that Debian-Med
is also about Microbiology. I hope that I was able to convince
them that it would make perfectly sense to package the Free
Software they use and write at Sanger should be included into
Debian and making it part of the Debian-Med project.
BioLinux
A developer of the BioLinux team contacted me in the hall and
told me that Debian-Med is interesting for them and that they
want to cooperate. Stupid me - I forgot to ask for exchanging
cards - but lets see whether he will find our list to start
discussing a reasonable way for cooperation.
Grids
It might have turned out that grids are an interesting part
from the Debian-Med perspective. Namely Daniel Bayer had a
talk about grids:
https://penta.debconf.org/~joerg/events/88.en.html
I noticed that he had some promising discussions with
Thomas 'Mr. FAI' Lange about adopting "Fully automatical install"
(FAI) for installing grids.
To be honest I personally was really astonished that FAI was
not used for Debian based grids because I would consider
no other technique to install more than two Debian boxes.
FAI is really a great and sophisticated tool that is even
packaged for Debian (and BTW, it is used also at Sanger as
I learned in the talk above). So perhaps we should make
FAI even part of Debian-Med and provide some specific hints
and docs about it.
CDD-Tools in general
cdd-dev:
It turned out that no other CDD than Debian med is actually using
the CDD toolkit I wrote to base all CDDs on the same technical
infrastructure. The toolkit was written three years ago to build
all existing meta packages. Unfortunately it was not adopted and
Debian-Edu packaging evolved further away independently which
makes cdd-dev not usable in the current state. I agreed with
Petter Reinholdsen (Debian-Edu) to start a new effort just inside
the Debian-Edu CVS and try to build debian-Edu packages first
with the (to be written) cdd-dev 0.4 that is actually building the
Debian-Edu packages and tasksel stuff. Once this is uploaded
and thus accepted I'll add those things we use in Debian-Med
(menu stuff and so on). Perhaps we will get some help from
people who are interested in Debian-GIS.
Debian-Live
It is real fun if you see that your dreams become true. I do not
even remember whether it was on LinuxTag in 2002 or 2003 when I
started to try convincing people that we need a really easy way
to build live CDs instead of the Knoppix remastering business
that tends to created soonish outdated CDs because the remastering
is not really fun. Over the years of silence I just did not
followed the discussion about this idea (that as I learned others
had independetly). And now finally there is everything you need:
https://penta.debconf.org/~joerg/events/6.en.html
Kudos to Daniel Baumann and Marco Amadori.
This will enable us to make Debian-Med live CDs for demonstrations
easily. Have fun with this nice tool.
So far my report from DebConf. It would be nice if somebody would
like to move it completely or in parts to the News section of the
web pages.
Greetings from the rest of the Debian community that joined DebConf
to the Debian-Med people
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de